Norman Beaton

Known to millions of viewers as Desmond in Channel 4’s eponymously titled sitcom, Norman Beaton was the UK’s first bona fide black TV star.

Born 31 October 1934 in Georgetown, Guyana (then British Guiana), he did some amateur acting while training as a teacher, and developed a parallel career as a Calypso singer, scoring a no. 1 hit in Trinidad and Tobago with 'Come Back Melvina' in 1959. 

Arriving in Britain in 1960, he entered the theatre in 1965 with the musical drama Jack of Spades, for which he wrote both the scenario - inspired by his own experiences as a young West Indian in Liverpool - and the music.

But overshadowing these - and much of the rest of his career - was his title role in Channel 4’s Desmond's, by some margin Britain's most successful and popular black sitcom, which we will explore in the next Black History Month feature in this series. 

In 1994, the widespread shock and sadness that greeted the news of his death revealed just how fondly he was regarded, as did the inauguration, in 1995, of the Norman Beaton Award at the Birmingham Film and TV Festival to reward outstanding multicultural work and, in 2003, of the BBC's Norman Beaton Fellowship for new radio acting talent.